madbaker | Cracked Foundation

We watched four episodes of Foundation and I am done. (Dun dun dun!) I don't care about gender/race swapping - I actually thought it worked better with Gaal Dornick to emphasize her naivety and not fitting in. But it's clear that this adaptation has some names in common with the books and nothing else.

The books were a product of their time, as well as the author's viewpoint, in their emphasizing rationality and science over faith and superstition. They also had very little action, usually two or three people talking about what happened. So sure, changes and updates needed. But instead the series deliberately subverts the original - the TV Salvador Hardin says "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent" - a core tenet of the character in the books - is "an old man's philosophy." The series goes totally woo-woo with visions, mind-links to dead characters, and seems to have ripped off large parts of Dune. It turns the Foundation settlers into a religious cult. (I think the conceit of the book would have worked better: that the Foundation thinks it is there solely to safeguard learning by producing an Encyclopedia Galactica. Up until the first Seldon Crisis when he disabuses them of that notion and they have to flail upon losing their core purpose.)

Also, a robot kills people. Who invented the Three Laws of Robotics? Oh, right, Isaac Asimov.

I don't get it. If you dislike the original material so much that you want to discard and disavow all of it, why adapt it in the first place?

Current Mood: bitchy

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

beanolc

I never read it and thought the series was a bit better than meh. Randy read the series and enjoys the show, but he's a lot more forgiving than I tend to be.

From:

madbaker

I'm not always a purist; changing mediums means that the story usually has to change. The latest Dune adaptation is an example of it working, where the story is kept sufficiently intact to please fans while making something that resonates with newbies.

From:

aimeric

The books were formative for me, and I have the BBC Radio Series playing occasionally as I fall asleep at night. (It's not without its problems - in particular, the Mule is horribly portrayed - but it's comfort listening).

For me the show was about 1/3 inspired, 2/3 utter crap. And unfortunately, most of the 1/3 is the plotline that has nothing to do with the book.

[Anyone not wanting to know the plot of the rest of the season, many spoilers below. Also, warning: hoo boy, this is long]

I don't object to taking liberties with the source - the original is full of one-dimensional characters that exist only for the sake of the plot to move along, some contrivances, and some paper-thin worldbuilding ("and then people just forgot how atomics worked, because Dark Ages"). But the throughline that needed to remain intact was that there was a Plan, supported by Science, and one that could not be solved by Might or Violence, which nevertheless drove seemingly overmatched Terminus inevitably forward to future Empire while surrounded a sea of barbarism. (At least, until a certain Thing happens - said thing being one of my favorite rug pulls in all of Science Fiction)

The biggest problem from a narrative perspective is that the plot, for at least the first couple of books, is mostly reactive - the plot is on rails (Hardin even points out at one point that they shouldn't do anything at all until they're maneuvered into a corner, in order to ensure that they have only one course of action - which for the resolution of most of the early crises turns out to be Just Sit There And Wait It Out). Credit to Asimov to making something like that compelling, but it's difficult to sustain that as tension in a tv show.

And I'll give (a little) credit to the show for attempting to consider our current slide of civilization, from overreactions to terrorism to what Carl Sagan would term the Demon-Haunted World (seriously, just add in an anti-vax galactic populace...). And as I've said, despite the utter tweeness of Cleon == anagram of Clone, their plotline actually has some interesting things to say about stagnation, free will, etc. It's at least a *thinking* plot as opposed to mindless battles. Granted, jettisoning the (never seen) Ruling Houses given lip service in the first section of the book in favor of a single (or three-in-one; hm, no religious parallel there, no sir!) eternal ruler as an avatar of the entire problem is both a boon and a hindrance. The former because it's an easy way to symbolically show, to personify, what's happening to the Empire, but it also removes us from a real-world analogue. (Imagine, instead, Game of Thrones / Dune level bickering among Houses clinging to their own power and $$$ while civilization falls).

[the Cleon plot has one massively stupid twist at the 2/3 mark that undoes a good part of my goodwill there (someone's introduced a genetic abnormality into their DNA, and did it since Cleon I!), but the last couple of episodes redeem it somewhat (Empire gets involved in a religious order's rite of succession on a particular planet. Again, some interesting philosophical points there, but complete unrelated to the books...)]

As for Demerzel, the showrunners were hamstrung legally here. They did not have the rights to any of Asimov's robot characters/novels, nor The Three Lows of Robotics. (of course, it's not that that should give them license to say, "Oh, then she can kill!") She actually turns out to be one of the most multifaceted characters in the show by the end of the season, even though, again, absolutely NOTHING close to the books. And she's actually a counterpart to everything Cleon's going through - to what extent is she bound by her programming throughout her near-limitless life, can she change? [she even accepts religion, even though she knows its folly. Reminds me of Alan Moore saying he prays to a snake god he knows doesn't exist] (not novel concepts, but actually not badly handled in implementation...if again, you remove Asimov's name from the credits).

I also like Gaal's background. Unnecessary by itself, but it's a nice bit of worldbuilding and, as I said, a much more personal and effective way of showing the slide of civilization [spoiler, if I remember correctly: Gaal eventually makes it back home to find that everyone else has perished...basically because they ignored her Climate Change prognosis. Yes, it's a bit on-the-nose, but more believable than "we can't train nuclear engineers anymore"].

Gaal is...a mixed bag. [spoiler:] They keep her around, popping up in hibernation in deep space...where her pod is commandeered to a ship manned by a Seldon AI, who tells her him as a martyr was part of the Plan, but it was supposed to be Raych in hibernation, with the implication being that he was going to run off with the Seldon AI to form the Second Foundation. A Seldon AI, instead of a recording, is an interesting choice, but everything else here is just...ugh. Seldon tells her she has uncanny abilities (hinted at psionics) and is actually something he couldn't predict, a threat to her plan. One guess as to who it sounds like they're setting up. WHY COMBINE THOSE TWO CHARACTERS? Not to mention that Seldon implies that everything went immediately off the rails planwise as soon as she accidentally walked in on Seldon and Raych in episode two, which completely jettisons the *Entire* Premise. The whole point is to lock the audience into this feeling of Predestination for a couple of seasons, and THEN yank it out from under them.

As for the rest of the season...hoo boy, you hadn't even gotten close to the utter ridiculousness, pointlessness, and insane coincidences (and of course, tons of violence) that marked the back half of the Terminus plotline. They sort of combined the first two crises (well, one-and-a-half; the religious aspect of the second is saved for season 2, judging by the synopsis/trailers). I actually do like that they show Seldon's group packed up and stuck on a years-long trip out to Terminus and then having makeshift settlements in the beginning, rather than "here's instantaneous transportation to the backwater edge of the galaxy and poof, instant civilization - we get the sense of how isolated they are in a way that never came through in the books. But to tie the Anacreonians, also supposedly from that same remote area no one cares about, to the incident that sets off the whole plot, undermines that entire thing. (Also, "Thespians"? Really. Look, I get the joke pairing them with Anacreon, but REALLY?) Of course, the implication is that they were innocent and that Seldon caused the 9/11 parallel just to create them as an enemy for the First Crisis. But the plot never actually gets there, unless that's getting saved for later.

Instead - get this - some massive Old Empire ship, randomly popping in and out of space, shows up above their planets, and both sides race for control of it. Seriously. That's a good part of the second half of the plot.

And finally, there's the Vault, with its Null Field, that only Hardin can get close to. Of course, it's got a Seldon AI in it. Fine. But then Hardin takes off for the stars, in hibernation. Somehow, a century later, Hardin finds Gaal's ship, with Gaal in hibernation, underneath the ocean of the planet she lands on. Somehow. Oh, and it turns out she's her Secret Daughter, and they've had some sort of psychic connection, which is why Hardin ended up there.

Um, what?

WHAT?